The past few decades of farm economics have created a system in which one-third of the food on our plate now relies on just one pollinator — the honeybee. And it’s dying.  Story by Josephine Marcotty – Photos and videos by Renée Jones Schneider.

“A rush of recent research points to a complex triangle of causes: pervasive pesticides, a flowerless rural landscape dominated by cash crops, and the spread of parasites and diseases. Together they inflict enormous damage on the honeybees that crisscross the country each spring and summer, like migrant laborers, to pollinate everything from almonds in California to apples in Maine. In the past several decades, the number of crops that depend on bees for pollination has quadrupled, even as the number of hives available to pollinate them has dropped by half. Every winter, beekeepers on average continue to lose a fourth to a third of their hives, raising fears that the gradual decline of these remarkably resilient insects will soon limit the production of foods that Americans now take for granted. Most consumers are insulated from the threat — as long as the aisles of America’s grocery stores are resplendent with apples, lemons, coffee, cocoa, peanuts, grapes, onions, cucumbers and watermelons. But not Ellis and his sometimes partner Jeff Anderson, a third-generation beekeeper from Eagle Bend, Minn., whose family has made the annual trek to and from the California almond bloom since 1961. For them, catastrophe could be just one harvest away.”